“Some people do,” he conceded. “Maybe most. But let’s go on the assumption that I’ve seen more weird shit than you have.”
“I bet you haven’t,” said Rain.
“You’d lose that bet, kid. No matter what you’ve seen, I can guarantee you’d lose that bet.”
He let her think about that. After a while, she said, “What if I told you that this might be something, um, different. Something strange. Stranger than—”
“For fuck’s sake, Rain, you’re walking all around the word. Just say it.”
“What word?”
“Supernatural.”
He heard a sound that might have been a sob. Fear or relief—it was hard to say because sobs all sound the same. Especially this late at night.
“It’s pretty dark out here,” said Monk, “and I’m not talking about the time of day. Now, if you want my information, then it’s tit for tat. Give me something.”
“Over the phone?”
“Over the phone.”
After a moment, Rain said, “I think monsters are after my son, Monk. I think they killed that boy as a warning. Or drove him to kill himself, I don’t know. I think they’re going to kill my son. Soon. I think I don’t have a lot of time to find him.”
Monk leaned back and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger until fireworks burst in his eyes. “Give me more than that.”
The wind turned once more to a gale, more goddamn rain fell, pinging and popping against the hood of his car. Monk did not say a word for the thirty minutes it took Rain Thomas to tell him her story. Not only her story but also the stories of three of her friends—the people he’d seen her sitting with in the Diner. Monk could tell she was abbreviating it, leaving some parts out, compressing others. That was okay. He was more interested in her tone of voice, in the nuances of pain and fear and panic that were cooked into every word. Monk was very good at reading people. His job and his life depended on it as much now, in the work he did here, as it did when he was a soldier hunting bad guys in the deserts and jungles of the world. Any hunter who can’t read meaning, intent, motive, desire, and veracity was going to die. Especially at his level of the game.
She even told him about Doctor Nine, and that part was as terrifying now as it had been at the diner with her friends.
When she was done, Monk said, “Jesus H. T. Christ doing cartwheels.”
“I know.”
“That’s some goddam story.”
“I know,” she said. “I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.”
Monk studied the burning end of his cigarette before he replied. “You were wrong about that then and you’re wrong now.”
“Wait, what? Why would you believe me at all?”
“But I need something else from you.”
“What?” she asked, instantly wary.
“You to tell me what was on that shower curtain.”
Rain paused for so long Monk had to look at the phone display to assure himself that she hadn’t dropped off the call.
“Rain?”
“It was a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It’s mine. I had one like it but Doctor Nine took it.” She told him about what had happened in her apartment and Monk listened without comment. “That’s the one the boy used to hang himself with, wasn’t it?”
Monk flicked his cigarette out into the storm then rubbed his eyes, feeling old and scared and used up. “Yes,” he said.
Beneath his clothes, the faces seemed to twist as if trying to shout something out to him.
INTERLUDE EIGHTEEN
MONK’S STORY, PART 4
It took her an hour to get it right, and I could feel when it was right. We both could.
I spat the strap onto my lap and sat there, gasping, out of breath, fucked up. I could see the pity in Patty’s eyes. She was crying a little, like she always does. The light in the room had changed. Become brighter, and the edges of everything were so sharp I could cut myself on their reality. All the colors bled away. Except for red, white, black, and all those shades of gray. That’s what I saw. It’s all I’d see until I was done with what I had to do.
Sometimes it was like that for days. Other times it was fast. Depends on how good a look the girl got, and what I’d be able to tell from that look.
Patty helped me up, grunting with the effort. I was two fifty and change. None of it blubber. A lot of it was scar tissue. The room did an Irish ceili dance around me, and my brain kept trying to flip the circuit breakers off.
“If you’re going to throw up, use the bathroom.”
“Not this time,” I managed to wheeze, then I grabbed my stuff, clumsied my way into my shirt and jacket, and stumbled out into the night, mumbling something to her that was supposed to be “Thanks,” but might have been “Fuck you.”
Patty wouldn’t take offense. She understood. Like I said, one of my people.
The night was hung wrong. The buildings leaned like drunks, and the moon hid a guilty smile behind torn streamers of cloud. It took me half an hour to find my way back to where the girl was killed. My eyes weren’t seeing where my feet were walking, and sometimes I crashed into things, tripped over lines in the pavement, tried to walk down an alley that wasn’t there. It’s like that for a bit, but it settles down.
Once I was on that street, it settled down a lot. I stood by the step where I’d found her blood. This is where it gets difficult for me. Victims don’t usually know enough to really help, not even when I can see what they saw when they died. Like I was doing now. Half the time they didn’t see it coming. A drive-by or a hazy image of a tire iron. The feel of hands grabbing them from behind.
It was kind of like that with the girl.
Olivia. I realized I knew her name now. Olivia Searcy. Fifteen. Even younger than I thought, but I was right about the clothes. They were her sister’s. Shoes and push-up bra, too. She wanted to look older. No, she wanted to be older. But that was as old as she’d ever get.
I knew why she was there, and it was a bad episode of a teen romance flick. She was a sophomore in high school; he was a senior. Good looking, smart, from a family with some bucks. Good grades. A real find, and maybe in time he’d grow up and be a good man. But he was eighteen and all he wanted was pussy, and a lot of guys know that young pussy is often dumb pussy, which makes it easy pussy. So they come on to them, making them feel cool, feel special, feel loved. And they get some ass, maybe pop a cherry, and move on the instant the girl gets clingy. Fifteen-year-olds always get clingy, but there are always more of them. The boy, Drake, hadn’t yet plundered Olivia. It was part of the plan for tonight.
They went to a party at some other guy’s house a long way from here, in a part of town where stuff like this isn’t supposed to happen, which is a stupid thought, because stuff like this happens everywhere. The party was fun and it was loud. They got high. Got smashed. He got grabby and she freaked. Maybe a moment of clarity, maybe she saw the satyr’s face behind the nice-boy mask. Whatever. She bolted and ran.
She didn’t know if Drake tried to find her, because she tried really hard not to be found. She was found, though. Just not by Drake.
For a little bit there, I thought I was going to have to break some parents’ hearts by fucking up their pretty-boy son, but that wasn’t in tonight’s playbook. Drake hadn’t done anything worse than be a high school dickhead. He got her drunk, but he hadn’t forced her, hadn’t slipped her a roofie. And, who knows, maybe if he’d found her in time, he’d have become Galahad and fought for her honor. Might have saved her life.
Probably would have died with her.
Or maybe the killer would have opted out and gone looking for someone else. A lot of serial killers and opportunistic killers are like that. They’re not Hannibal Lecter. They’re not tough, smart, and dangerous. Most of them are cowards. They feel totally disempowered by whatever’s happened to them—abusive parents, bad genes, who the fuck cares? They hurt and terrify and mutilate and kill because it makes them fe
el powerful, but it’s a lie. It’s no more real than feeling powerful by wearing a Batman costume at Halloween. You may look the part, but you’re a long way from saving Gotham City.
All of that flooded through my brain while I stood there and looked at the street through the eyes of a dead girl. Seeing it the way Olivia saw it right as hands grabbed her from behind. Right as someone pulled her back against his body so she could feel his size, his strength, the hard press of his cock against her back. Right as he destroyed her. Right as the cold edge of the knife was pressed into the soft flesh under her left ear.
I felt all of that. Everything. Her nerve endings were mine. Her pain exploded through me. The desperate flutter of her heart changed the rhythm of mine into a panic, like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings against a closed window. I felt her break inside as he ruined her. I heard the prayers she prayed, and they echoed in my head like they’d echoed in hers. She hadn’t been able to scream them aloud because first there was a hand over her mouth, and then there was the knife against her throat and those threats in her ear.
And when he was done, I felt the burn.
That line, like someone moving an acetylene torch along a bead of lead. Moving from under my left ear to under my right.
I felt her die because I died, too. Olivia drowned in her own blood.
Then there was a strange time, an oddly quiet time, because I was with her when she was dead, too. When he wrapped her in a plastic tarp and put her in the trunk. It was so weird, because while he did that, he was almost gentle. As if afraid of hurting her.
Fucking psychopath.
While the car drove from where she’d died to where he’d dumped her, Olivia slipped into that special part of the universe where the dead see one another. Certain kinds of dead. The dead who were part of a family. Victims of the same knife.
His people.
Olivia discovered that she was not the only one. Not the first, not the tenth.
She wasn’t sure how many because he moved around so much. Had moved around. Not so much anymore. Not since he moved to this town. The victims she met were the ones who’d died here.
Twenty-six of them.
The youngest was eight.
I met those victims, too, because I was inside the memory. Like I’d actually been there. That’s how it worked. I talked to them, and most of them already knew who and what I was. The first time I’d encountered that, it shocked the shit out of me. But now I understood. Not to say I’m used to it, because I’d have to be a special kind of fucked up to be used to something like that. No, it was more like I knew how to deal. How to use it.
Some of them had died just like Olivia. An attack from behind. Everything from behind. No chance of an identification. He varied it a little. One of those nearly patternless killers that the FBI have no idea how to profile. A knife across the throat, an icepick between the right ribs, a garrote made from a guitar string, a broken neck.
Most were like that.
Most. Not all.
There was one who fought. She’d had a little judo and some tae kwon do. Not enough, but enough to make him work for it. It was one of the early ones, after he’d moved here. The one that made him want to never bring them home again. She’d gotten out, and he’d chased her into the front yard and caught her before she could wake the neighbors. Single homes, lots of yard on all sides. Cul-de-sac. When he caught up to her, she spun around and tried to make a fight of it.
I saw every second of it.
The yard. The house.
Him.
I saw him.
I saw him block her punch, and then a big fist floated toward her face and she was gone. He was a big guy, and he knew how to hit. The punch broke the girl’s neck, which made it easier on her, if easy is a word that even applies.
I stood there and watched all of it play out inside my head. No idea how long I was there. Time doesn’t matter much when I’m in that space. I was there for every second of every minute of every attack. Beginning to end. All the way to when he dumped them, or buried them, or dropped them off a bridge.
Stack it all up and it was days.
Days.
Shotgunned into my head.
I wish I’d had the leather strap. Instead, I had to bite down on nothing, clamp my jaws, ball my fists, clench my gut, and eat the fucking pain.
It wouldn’t save any of those girls. Not one. And maybe it wouldn’t matter that I felt it all but didn’t have to live it. Or die from it. I know that.
I couldn’t help a single one of them. I couldn’t help Olivia.
But as my skin screamed from the phantom touches and the blades and everything else, I swore that I’d help the next girl.
Goddamn son of a bitch, I’d help the next girl.
Because, you see, I saw the house.
I saw the number beside the door.
I saw the tags on the car parked in the driveway.
And I saw the motherfucker’s face.
I went and sat down on the step next to the blood. Waited. I knew she’d be there eventually. It was how it worked.
Still surprised me when I looked up and there she was. Pale, thin, young, her face as bright as a candle. Eyes filled with forever.
“You can still opt out,” I told her. “I can turn this over to the cops. Let them handle it.”
She said nothing, but she gave me a look. We both knew that this guy was too careful. There would be no evidence of any kind. He’d been doing this for years and he knew his tradecraft. No semen, no hairs, nothing left for them to trace. The knife was gone where no one would ever find it. And he wasn’t a souvenir collector. The smarter ones aren’t. They could turn his house inside out, and the only things they’d find would be jack and shit.
Even if they watched him, he’d turn it off for a while. For long enough. Police can’t afford to run surveillance for very long. They lose interest, even if they thought the guy was good for Olivia’s murder.
I sighed. Actually, I wanted to cry. What she was asking was big and ugly, and it was going to hurt both of us.
She stood there with a necklace of bright red and those bottomless eyes.
She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to.
The price was the price. She was willing to pay it because she was a decent kid who would probably have grown up to be someone of note. Someone with power. Someone who cared. Those eyes told me that this wasn’t about her.
It was all about the next girl.
And the one after that.
And the one after that.
I buried my face in my hands and wept.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Rain huddled in, gripping her cell phone with icy fingers. Bug snuggled in beside her, trying to share warmth. Monk Addison was still on the other end of the call. Still there, and that was something.
They talked about the shower curtain, trying to make sense of it, but Doctor Nine haunted the conversation. Somehow he had done it. He had taken the curtain and given it to the boy.
“It doesn’t make sense,” insisted Rain. “That boy hung himself with the curtain before it went missing from my bathroom. How?”
“How was the kid in the morgue an older version of your son, Rain?” asked Monk.
“I don’t know.”
“I sure as shit don’t,” he admitted. “But, listen, I have one more question to ask. Maybe it’s another part of this. There was writing on the wall near where Hoto killed himself. Pretty sure it wasn’t Hoto who put it there. Different handwriting. It said: They are coming. Do you know what that might mean?”
“I … don’t know,” said Rain, but she could hear the doubt in her own voice. “I’ve been seeing some things around town. Something I think may be connected, but I don’t know how. Monk, have you ever heard of ‘the Shadow People’?”
He said, “Heard of them, but not sure I can remember what I heard. Why?”
“It keeps coming up. I see it written on walls around town. I think maybe Doctor Nine and the nu
rse are Shadow People. Whatever that means.”
Thunder rumbled far away.
“Monk,” said Rain, “what’s going on? I mean, seriously, what is this? What can we do about this?”
“We start by looking at this like a fight, kid,” growled Monk.
“That’s what my friends and I all said, but how do we fight something like this?”
“Maybe I can figure that part out,” said Monk. “When I was in the military, I learned that a soldier is only as good as the intel he gets. You know that word? Intel? Intelligence? It means information that’s gathered and analyzed. No matter how tough or scary the enemy is, if they’re fighting us, then they have to be here, in our world. Maybe not ordinary flesh and blood, but bound by some of the same rules. We have some information already—what you’ve experienced, what your friends have been through, and some of what I’ve found. Now that we’ve compared notes, we collectively know more than we did individually. That’s a strength. It makes it less scary.”
“Not really.”
“It does for me. It will for you,” Monk assured her. “That’s a start, but we need more, and I know who to call. I have a friend, Dr. Jonatha Corbiel down at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s an expert in folklore, particularly the folklore of the supernatural.”
“Wait, I know that name. She’s black, right? Pretty? I think I’ve seen her on the History Channel. Those shows they play around Halloween.”
“That’s her. She’s not just a talking head, though. Jonatha’s a world-class expert. Think of her as my Van Helsing. I don’t hunt vampires, but you get the gist. I’m going to tell her everything and see what she has to say.”
“What if she doesn’t know anything about this stuff?”
“Then we’ll try something else,” he said. “The point is that Doctor Nine’s picked a fight. Fine. He’s landed some good punches. Fair enough. He doesn’t get to just roll over us, though. He’s declared a war, so we give him a war. Our job is to make sure we go into that war armed with every scrap of intel we can get. We need to wise up and gear up.”